Alan Greenspan: Iraq War was Really for Oil

Alan Greenspan's long-awaited memoir "The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World" is scheduled for release Monday. Photo by cnn.com

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan has shocked the White House by saying the prime motive for the war in Iraq was oil.

"I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil," Greenspan says in his long-awaited memoir, as cited by Sunday Times.

Britain and America have always insisted the war had nothing to do with oil. Bush said the aim was to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and end Saddam's support for terrorism, Sunday Times stresses.

The articles claims that the White House has been "shaken" by Greenspan's declaration.

Greenspan, 81, a Republican whose 18-year tenure as head of the US Federal Reserve was widely admired, also delivers a stinging critique of President George W Bush's economic policies.

"My biggest frustration remained the president's unwillingness to wield his veto against out-of-control spending," Greenspan wrote.

Bush took office in 2001, the last time the government produced a budget surplus. Every year after that, the government has been in the red. In 2004, the deficit swelled to a record USD 413 B.

"The Republicans in Congress lost their way," Greenspan wrote. "They swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose."

"The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World" is scheduled for release Monday.

While Mr. Greenspan as Fed Chairman was the equivocator-in-chief, such an incisive statement was out of character. Here he utilized reductionism regarding the Anglo-American foreign policy in the Caspian Basin and its logical periphery of the Middle East to sell his book. Encircling China and frustrating Russia's attempts to encroach on Eastern Europe is the overarching foreign policy constellation. From the Silk Road Strategy Act to current policy implementations, Operation Iraqi Freedom was a logical corollary to that which came before. Clausewitz's famous line "War is merely a continuation of politics" is eminently applicable here. Greenspan isn't above using the shibboleths of the far left (it was all for oil!) to exploit enterprise capitalism's excesses. Now that Mr. Bernanke controls the money supply, circumlocution is no longer serviceable. However, since a text out of context is a pretext, perhaps this article traduced Mr. Greenspan's message by highlighting this pericope.

That business about the war being about oil has been bandied about for years, but I'm surprised to hear that opinion from Greenspan.

The rest of the article I'd agree with. Just like Reagan put the California budget into the black after years of democratic regime, so his successors in the Presidency put the whole country into the red. Again a question of lesser of the evils in the next election. The Republicans haven't done well, by any means, but I still see the Democrats as the greater evil, because traditionally, they're the tax-and-spend party.

However, fiscal and political mismanagement are different subjects, so everyone's free to argue his viewpoint. I personally think the government listened to Greenspan far too long as it is. His opinion more or less became fiscal law. Now he complains that his ideas weren't followed? Strange.

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